Anytime someone wants to accuse Kanye West of anything, nobody really bats an eye. Anytime someone wants to accuse Beyoncé of some shit, it becomes a case of “Molly, you in danger, girl.” Alas, a Norwegian newspaper has done just that by accusing Tidal of giving both of those two false streaming counts – hundreds of millions of false streams – and notching them higher royalties. And to think: Kanye thought Jay-Z and Tidal were screwing him over!

Spin says Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv claims Tidal jacked up the streams for Kanye’s The Life Of Pablo and Bey’s Lemonade by over 300 million plays combined. They supposedly found this after getting hold of a hard drive that had manipulated Tidal data on it. DN accuses the Jay-owned service of fueling MAYJAH royalty payouts to his wife and frenemy at the expense of other artists. It’s a good thing Madonna is still riding a high of a Met Gala theme tailormade for her, or her ass would be sending an armada of debt-collecting, backup-dancing muscle queens to get her rightful share of false streams for “Lucky Star.”

Considering Tidal has an estimated 3 million subscribers, its claim that Kanye’s album had 250 million streams in its first 10 days would have meant every user listened to The Life Of Pablo eight times a day for all 10 days. PSHAW! The Beyhive might do that for Lemonade, but nobody would have done that for Yeezus. The investigation concluded that Kanye had 150 million “duplicate” plays submitted to his record label, and Bey had 170 million. Tidal denies the report and calls it a smear campaign.

This is a smear campaign from a publication that once referred to our employee as an “Israeli Intelligence officer” and our owner as a “crack dealer.”

We expect nothing less from them than this ridiculous story, lies and falsehoods. The information was stolen and manipulated and we will fight these claims vigorously.

If this ended up being true, that could mean we could expect the Beyhive to start a Kickstarter for making sure she doesn’t lose any of her $4 million royalty payment.

While Kanye’s alleged duplicate plays all came in at 2am and 5am (probably when the security guard at Tidal HQ succumbed to Pimp Mama Kris’s sorcery), Bey’s followed a more elaborate pattern based on users listening to the songs. Most normal people would be pissed at something like that, but the Beyhive will hear about the complex scamming sequence and just see it as further Illuminati validation.

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